Capacity planning of a server used in a server/client wide-area network (WAN) is quickly becoming more important as the use of WANs (such as the Internet) rapidly increase. WAN servers often are used by Internet sites and must be able to efficiently handle the anticipated requests to the site. Capacity planning helps predict if and when system saturation will occur by testing the maximum user load and speed of the target server. Thus, accurate and realistic testing a server is a crucial foundation for building a network system.
A common approach to testing a server is to perform browser or client recording of a browser session. Recording of a browser session generally involves starting a browser session and making requests to a server. All of the outgoing HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) messages are recorded and the status of the request and the contents of what was requested will be displayed. One problem, however, with client recording of a browser session is that it does not accurately simulate the real-world case where a plurality of clients are sending requests to the server. Although several copies of the single browser session may be played back simultaneously to simulate a plurality of clients, this can lead to a shut down of the operating system due to thread limitations well before a realistic number of clients can be simulated. More importantly, the timing of a client recorded single browser session is not accurate or realistic because only copies of a single browser session are being played back. In addition, critical server information such as the number of open sockets, when the sockets are closed, the state of a request (i.e., where a HTTP server is with regard to processing the request), when the HTTP server began to process the request and information and possible storage of a request that caused the server or HTTP service to shutdown prior to request processing are not available. Thus, client recording completely fails to capture a great deal of server information, including the important server information listed above.